Mission

The mission of the Massachusetts Big Data Initiative is to expand the Commonwealth’s position as a world leader in the growing big data industry and enable the region to become the premier global hub for big data innovation and technology.

This effort is driven by the an innovative public economic development agency working to support a vibrant, growing economy across Massachusetts. MassTech develops meaningful collaborations across industry, academia and government and was the lead state partner in the development of the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke, Mass., an important resource for big data and scientific computing in the Commonwealth.

Organization and Research

The Mass Big Data Initiative was announced on May 31st 2012 at the Massacchusetts Instititue of Technology’s department for Computer Science and Artificial Inteligience Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass.

The 2014 Mass Big Data Report: A Foundation for Global Leadership has been assembled and released with support from the Innovation Institute at the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative and the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership. This report represents a foundational analysis of the regional Mass Big Data ecosystem and its position as a global leader in the expanding fields of big data, open data, and analytics.

Initiative Partners

The efforts of the Mass Big Data Initiative are supported by partner organizations across the Commonwealth. These include:

The Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development (EOHED) The mission of EOHED is the creation of Homes and Jobs in the Commonwealth by aligning the state’s housing and economic development agencies to better coordinate policies and programs that ensures Massachusetts will maintains its global competitive edge.

Massachusetts Office of Information Technology Division (MassIT)MassIT - formerly the Information Technology Division (ITD) - enables the Commonwealth’s agencies to deliver high quality, efficient and effective services to their customers by providing a range of centralized IT services; overseeing IT policies, standards and architecture; and promoting cross-agency collaboration and adoption of shared services.

A non- profit community workspace located in Kendall Square, Cambridge, hack/reduce represents a regional nexus where people working with Big Data can come to share infrastructure, resources, and knowledge. Hack/reduce provides free access to big data storage and processing to interested and motivated individuals to work with large datasets in novel new ways. It hosts community events and meetups, regular hackathons, and guest lectures and workshops. Collaboratively funded by IBM, Microsoft, Atlas Venture, North Bridge Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Highland Capital Partners, Goodwin Proctor and MassTech, hack/reduce seeks to :